War Questions

[Darkshade]

I have a couple questions regarding war topics. For the first war of the age, how low should you get someone's acre size before you switch chain targets? For a 500 acre attacker, should he be chained down to 200 acres, or maybe 150 acres? Also, how low should you get a fireball target's peasants before you stop fireballing?

[Bishop]

very early in the age i would just max gain - you typically chain until they overpop and desert and when you arent drafted that involves too many hits.

[noobium]

(a) - about 30% of their starting size if talking about attackers, on average. this is a very rough guideline but that is usuallly sufficient to force defense to release. at the start of war you should assign two chain targets if taking down attackers, assuming a standard setup of mostly attacker provinces.
always bear in mind that your primary objective with landchains is to remove troops, whether defensive or offensive troops or thieves. if a chain isn't removing troops within one wave of hits, then you have to seriously evaluate what you're doing. sometimes it is necessary to two waves to bring down an especially large province, but you should not get fixated on one target when there are targets you can take down.
chains at smaller sizes are less effective, as there is very little to lose in the first place compared to dropping say a 2k province to 500a. since extreme offense is common at that size, there is less defense to release and more means for a chained attacker to sustain themselves.
it's a really bad idea to war on 400-500 acres unless you like wasting a lot of time and energy, but that's neither here nor there.

(b) fireballs are for global econ control, so you should be fireballing everyone who isn't being set up for a landchain in the near future (say, 24-48 hours out, depending on how much of an economic threat you're trying to contain). dropping 8 10k peasant provinces to 5k is a lot better than dropping 3 10k to 2k peasants - set a peasant count that you want your targets to be stuck at, and aim to improve upon those marks with every round of fireballing. there are some reasons for extreme fireballing, if a particular target need to have their BE ruined or planning a wagelock. however, anyone with decent thieves can kidnap peasants back, so that places a lower bound on how far a target can be reduced.

[Persain]

noobium gives an excellent answer. However i disagree with dropping 8 people from 10->5k i'd rather take 3 to 2k, then another 3 to 2k....its about peasant regen. If you leave people at 5k u'll have those same people back and 10k very quickly and you'll never hold their whole kd down. (assuming the people at 10k are at max pop its not like they are gaining peasants)

[noobium]

presuming all provinces are under maximum population and MS is active, you'll have peasant regen whether you fb or not. for t/ms it's useful to aid away soldiers to attackers specifically for the t/m to keep generating peasants, because free resources is always useful. this in turn allows attackers to either avoid drafting and raise their birthrate, or accumulate soldier balls faster.

fewer total peasants across the board will mean fewer total peasant births across the board, so if you really want to control birth rates, you'll want to do as much damage to total peasant base as you can. this is where it is helpful to have a core that can cast FB and/or kidnap, but assuming you were to cast 1 fb/tick on every fireball target you are likely breaking even with birthrates. in all likelihood peasant counts will be uneven, so the fb will still focus somewhere. it's more a matter of pruning peasant counts to a set level, then switching focus to prune another, and another. some bloat targets are being ignored in order to set up future kidnap farms and landchains. eventually the long-term economic damage of global peasant control will show, if the fb can be kept up and the fb targets cannot kidnap back to solvency.

[Darkshade]

Thanks for the answers guys. Everyone gave good feedback. I think for fireballing, I will spread it out a little more across their kingdom rather than going too hard. Once you get their peasants low, the fireballs start to kill a much smaller amount of peasants. I think I would prefer my kingdom to be getting larger fireball hits, and wearing their whole kingdom's economy down more quickly.

I have another question. A vet in my kingdom says that it is not a good idea to have both Nightmares and Meteor Showers on chain targets, and that he would prefer Nightmares to get them overpopulated. Could someone give me more of an explanation on this? I know Meteor Showers is excellent for wearing provinces down.

[crease]

putting MS on a prov prechain is a waste of resources. You waste mana killing troops that were going to desert anyway.

[noobium]

Thanks for the answers guys. Everyone gave good feedback. I think for fireballing, I will spread it out a little more across their kingdom rather than going too hard. Once you get their peasants low, the fireballs start to kill a much smaller amount of peasants. I think I would prefer my kingdom to be getting larger fireball hits, and wearing their whole kingdom's economy down more quickly.

I have another question. A vet in my kingdom says that it is not a good idea to have both Nightmares and Meteor Showers on chain targets, and that he would prefer Nightmares to get them overpopulated. Could someone give me more of an explanation on this? I know Meteor Showers is excellent for wearing provinces down.

Well, it makes sense to pick a few fireball targets initially, if you want to sow doubt into where the next chain will come, or you want to crash the BE and economy of a few provinces. It also depends on how much your core can contribute to FB... note that if you have provinces that can succeed 40% of their fireballs, it is worthwhile to do so provided runes can be found. I prefer FB to be handled by the core as much as possible, while preserving dedicated mages for more nightmares, MS, Vortex, and stuff that requires a dedicated caster.
Also note that FB by itself is only a short- or medium-term solution, and a province that is deeply fireballed is far from dead. Whether it takes 16 or 40 hours to recover peasants is not so important, as long as those provinces still have troops and stuff that they can use. While heavy FB does have some uses for crippling particular provinces, FB against attackers is primarily for delaying the next dragon or preventing significant gc/soldier aid from going around. Because of peasants gained from trad march and kidnapping, heavy fb can be problematic when one kidnap or trad counts for the equivalent of 4-5 fireballs. With FB in this context, you're looking at holding off aid for the next 16-24 hours in order for your other ops to stick more reliably.
Also note that when chaining attackers, if they are sitting on a lot of peasants it facilitates overpopping and feeds those peasants back to your attacker core - or better yet, defensive provinces. In doing so, you can cancel fbs on one or two targets, and direct those ops either towards deeper fireballing or other magic ops.

edit: someone please educate me on how 3 is a bigger number than 4?